T.S Eliot would not have minded Robert Kaplan expropriating the title of his most famous poem for his latest book, Waste Land. Kaplan’s focus on the decline of the West and the birth of modernism were among the poem’s themes(175), and his latest tour de force on the unhappy state of the world is decidedly pessimistic on many fronts, even while dwelling only occasionally on Donald Trump.
In this extended essay, Kaplan makes three broad points. First, he analogizes the current world, all of it, to Germany’s inter-war Weimar Republic. He argues that, as Weimar was in permanent crisis, so, analogously, the entire planet is now “an interconnected system of states in which no one really rules(14).” Of course, that has long been true, but extraordinarily dense and rapid communications capabilities now make “closeness(34)” inevitable in a way that prior history did not experience. And since “complexity leads to fragility(42),” instability and conflict are riskier and more pervasive than in bygone days when the earth’s enormous size prevented diverse conflicts from becoming global.
Second, Kaplan argues that America, China and Russia, the three great powers, are all in decline, although at varying rates and for widely different reasons. The United States, he writes, suffers from “decay in the culture of public life, especially the media…[A]s the media has become less serious, so have our leaders(93).” The most graphic contrast between recent Presidents, for example, is Dwight Eisenhower, general and war hero, compared to Trump, who represents “the epitome of self-centered, emotional impulses(49).”
Analogizing to the late Ottoman Empire, Kaplan calls contemporary Russia Europe’s sick man(81). He stresses that Russia’s decline “is of a different scale entirely(96),” and “on a far more advanced state of rot(101)” than the US, although both had their own “disastrous wars of choice(90)” in Ukraine and Iraq respectively. The good news for us is that Iraq was not nearly so important to America as Ukraine was to Russia. US decline is “subtle and qualitative,” while Russia’s civilizational slide is “fundamental(107).” Tracking America’s worsening political leadership, Kaplan contrasts China’s Deng Xiaoping, whose record remains underrated, with his successor Xi Jinping: “nothing if not a Leninist ideologue(113)” who has “returned China to the die-hard authoritarianism, bordering on totalitarianism,” of Mao Tse-tung(115).
This competition among great powers, even receding ones, may sound like most of pre- 20 th century history, but it sets the stage for Kaplan’s third point: his lengthy diagnosis of the West’s decline, starting with the originator of that phrase, Oswald Spengler. Kaplan sees global urbanization as “the primary change in geopolitics(129),” with cities as “the conservative’s worst nightmare(134).” Although we shouldn’t need a reminder, Kaplan provides it: technology and civilization are not the same thing(170).
Through both physical and communications proximity, crowd psychologies and “excitable public opinion(136),” create a kind of “mob(139),” that accelerates especially America’s decline: “It is the masses speaking through one voice that are the danger(138).” In the US, Kaplan distinguishes between the conflicting views of those living in cities versus those dwelling in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “that vast obscurity…where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night(149).” All of this is compounded, as George Orwell depressingly writes in Nineteen Eighty-Four, because “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present(169).”
Enormous consequences flow from Kaplan’s take, perhaps none more important for the United States than its place in the wider world. For someone who earlier wrote a book called The Revenge of Geography, it is telling that Kaplan’s thinking today concludes that “the finite earth is gradually losing the race against technology and population growth(89).” This ever- increasing “closeness” increases the importance of what once seemed distant: “Every place, every river and mountain range, will be strategic(34).” The cyber age means “the enemy is now only one click away rather than thousands of miles away(117).”
With so many in the United States now seeking escape from both history and geography, these should be chilling words, but probably are not. The isolationist impulse currently at full flood in political debate is increasingly less and less intelligible. Policies sensible in a world where enormous distances meant conflicts could be contained are today not merely outdated but dangerous. This shift has been underway for some time, of course. Neville Chamberlain was wrong for many reasons to describe Germany’s 1938 lust for Czechoslovakia as a “quarrel in a far-away country,” when it was already in Great Britain’s backyard. Vice President Vance’s recent condescending lecture( https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/world/europe/vance-europe- immigration-ukraine.html ) to Europeans in Munich referred to election controversies in what he labelled “remote Romania,” reprising Chamberlain’s glib, arrogant and ultimately debilitating lack of situational and strategic awareness.
Faced with major, nuclear-armed adversary powers, and numerous lesser threats along a broad spectrum, America’s grievances against its own allies must be taken in perspective against the broader menaces we face together. Complaints that allies are not carrying their fair share of the common-defense burden are accurate and have domestic political appeal, but mere complaining is not strategic thinking. The answer, in Kaplan’s “close” world is not that allies do more and we do less, which is Trump’s hazy view, but that everyone on “our side” does more, because the global threat level is high and rising.
Contemporary policy prescriptions are not Kaplan’s immediate objective, but his broader analysis inevitably provokes them. His seemingly inexhaustible capacity to analogize and extrapolate is compelling and helpful, even if some, like the Weimar analogy, don’t bear the load Kaplan imposes on them. A closer fit to today’s “closeness” might well be Europe’s post- Reformation religious conflicts, or Archduke Ferdinand’s 1914 assassination by a rabid Serbian nationalist that ignited a continent-wide conflagration, thereby literally laying the groundwork for Eliot’s poem.
Indeed, despite Waste Land’s pessimism, Kaplan’s conclusion is the only correct one: “we have no choice but to fight on, as the outcome is not given to any of us in advance(186).” And this is where Eliot’s enduring conservative line, “[t]hese fragments I have shored against my ruins(159),” remains inspiring.
This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on March 4, 2025. Click here to read the original article.
